System of facilitating a sales transaction between a buying group and multiple sellers over and electronic network

Abstract

A system to facilitate the interaction of a group of buyers and a group of sellers through a transaction network, such as the internet, is disclosed. A buyer may start a buying group or join an existing group for purchasing a product or service. During the life cycle of a buying group, buyers are encouraged to invite other buyers to join the group via email, blog, social networking websites, or other means, thereby increasing the purchasing power of that group. Once a buying group has been established, sellers can compete for the volume sale. Sellers may review the bid price submitted by other sellers and submit competing bids. Once the bid cycle closes this system will automatically match the buyers and sellers based on a variety of factors including the order each buyer entered his or her purchase intent, each buyer's maximum price, each seller's bidding price, the quantity each seller can provide, and the order of each seller's bid. At the end of the matching, one or more sellers may fulfill a single group order.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0001]The present invention relates to demand aggregation for goods and services through a dynamic pricing mechanism in which, over an electronic network, such as the Internet, consumers can form buying groups to leverage their buying power and have sellers compete to fulfill their order. Once the bidding cycle has ceased a system for facilitating the sales transaction automatically matches the buyers and sellers based on a variety of factors.[0002]Almost everyone is familiar with these dynamic pricing mechanisms offered by such companies as eBay (www.ebay.com) and uBid (www.ubid.com), where consumers actively place bids, and the final transaction price is the highest price offered at the end of a bidding cycle. More recently, companies such as Priceline (www.priceline.com) and HotWire (www.hotwire.com), allow a single buyer to name the maximum, binding price he is willing to pay, and Priceline or Hotwire then, acting as the seller, either accepts or decl...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0007]Once a group of buyers who share the same purchase characteristics is formed and stored in the computer system, a second aspect of the invention employs reverse auction methodology, facilitating the interactive bidding of sellers to the group of buyers.

[0009]Fourthly, the invention still further provides a computer-readable data transmission medium containing a data structure that facilitates a sales transaction with both the seller and the buyer, in which the data transmissions sent to the seller varies from the data transmissions provided to the buyer.

[0010]Fifthly, the invention further provides a system to balance the buyers' commitment to buy and sellers' motivation to bid and therefore reduces the price the buyers ultimately pay.

Problems solved by technology

The buyer can never achieve a price less than the binding price he initially offered.

Mercata actually stocked the inventory it offered for sale and ultimately failed because it had to anticipate consumer demand—purchasing and inventorying appropriate levels of merchandise, which proved to be an overwhelming task.

While Mobshop was able to save on overhead by not stocking inventory, it still had the problem of anticipating demand, and getting suppliers to agree to aggressive pricing, when Mobshop could not guarantee a committed group of consumers.

Additionally, neither Mercata nor Mobshop could guarantee the price consumers were receiving was competitive, since sellers were not bidding for the volume sale, but instead a predetermined price trajectory was employed, which ultimately was not designed to maximize the buyer's savings.

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